The Retreat I Gave Grandma June
The number on the screen
I asked the girl at the window to run it again.
She was new, maybe nineteen, and she did not understand yet that you do not make a person say a number like that twice without being sure of it first.
“Fourteen dollars and eleven cents,” she said, softer the second time.
I stood in the lobby of First Farmers with my debit card still in my hand and the little pen on its bead chain swinging against the edge of the counter.
Fourteen dollars.
There had been fourteen thousand in that account on the first of September. I knew it the way I knew my own birthday.
“Can you print the last few withdrawals?” I said.
She printed them. The paper came out of the machine warm. I did not read it standing there. I went out and sat in my truck in the gravel lot and read it with the engine off.
August twenty-ninth. One withdrawal, in person, at the main branch. Thirteen thousand, nine hundred and change.
The signature line did not have my name on it.
It had Mama’s.
I set the paper on the seat and put both hands on the wheel and looked at the grain elevator across the road for a while. The co-op scale truck was pulling onto the pad. A man I had gone to school with waved at me through two windshields, and I waved back without really seeing him.
I was twenty-eight years old, and I had just watched eight years of my life come down to fourteen dollars and eleven cents.
Eight years of steers
I need to tell you about the money, because the money is the whole start of it.
When I was ten, my daddy walked me out to the lot behind our barn and put a halter in my hand and said, “This one’s yours, Casey. You feed him, you fit him, you sell him, you bank it.”
The calf’s name was Tank. He was a crossbred, more Angus than anything, and he stepped on my foot the first day and I cried and did not tell anybody.
That was the first steer. There were eight.
Every spring I bought a calf with the money from the last one. Every summer I was out there before the bus and after chores, walking him, washing him, breaking him to lead, teaching him to set his feet square so the judge could see what he was.
Every August I took him to the county fair and showed him in the ring in my white show pants, and then on Saturday I walked him through the junior livestock sale while the auctioneer sang and the buyers held up their numbers.
The hog farmers bought steers. The bank bought a steer most years. The implement dealer out on the highway bought one. They paid more than the animal was worth because that is what the sale is for, to put a little under a farm kid before she grows up.